The document discusses the importance of storytelling in branding and marketing, suggesting that modern strategies should focus on shared values and emotional connections with consumers. It emphasizes the use of design thinking and experiential marketing to create relevant customer interactions, moving away from traditional linear approaches. The text also presents a toolkit for implementing design thinking, advocating for iterative experimentation and customer co-creation to achieve effective marketing outcomes.

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BRANOPS: Making Your Story Your Strategy
“With tactics in the driver’s seat, everything changes: long-term vs. short-term becomes
meaningless; prediction is still possibleas anactivity, but probably futileinits results; action beats
analyzing-, correctable replaces dependable. The one thing that we know is that it’s in the
learning rather than the deciding.” The Death of Strategy – Forbes.com
BRANDING
“The company story is the company strategy,” says Ben Horowitz.
In the book Storyscaping: Stop Creating Ads, Start Creating Worlds by Gaston Legorburu and
Dareen McColl, they capture the idea of what I would call today’s branding. It is no longer about
segmentation and channels. It is about connecting through shared values and experiences.
Storyscaping is more than a philosophy; it is a methodology and approach that you can apply to
your business today. We further define Storyscaping as a landscape of emotional and
transactional experiences, where each connection inspires engagement with another, so the
brand becomes part of the consumer’s story. When you use the Storyscaping model, it will enable
you to evolve your craft in a way that makes it easier to connect to the physical, virtual, and
emotional Experience Space that surrounds the customer.

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Today’s marketing is about being there...in the space of your customer. Conversion is a result of
relevance. Relevance opens the doors to
experiences that matter, surprise, and
bring value to our prospects and
customers. Starting that conversation,
even on a website is determined by how
relevant you are to that person. Relevance
is the key to that door. Without it, you
can’t experience the value that you have
to offer. With it, your customer will enter.
The power of relevance is not how
connected you are to what they already
know. The power is in the experiences that
you offer.
Marketing is a messy subject. It is not
linear. It is not a deterministic process; you
do this, and this happens, cause and effect.
Anyone can come up with a great
marketing strategy, and in the same vein,
anyone can come up with a marketing idea.
As long as you build plans, websites, and
develop strategies in isolation of
customers, your chance of success is
minimized.
To do this, you must turn off the Solution Machine. Design thinking is perfect for situations where
we’re looking at a future that doesn’t exist yet, i.e., sales. Analytic tools break down very quickly.
Design thinking is the tool for defining that messy middle through prototyping alternative futures.
Rather than creating data for them, we simply target user’s experience. We can then observe
from behaviors and preferences which ones are working better than others.
OPERATIONS
“The core of what’s in a design thinking approach is an extreme focus on the user and their
experience, visualizing multiple options, testing those in the hands of the users,and iterating very
quickly from less appealing options to more appealing options. It just relies on experimentation
in which analytic problem-solving processes don’t need to rely on those as much because, in the
world of analytics, we have source data from which to work” – Tim Ogilvie.

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No longer are we using linear tools that are used to measure and support a well-defined end to
end processes. Today’s world has introduced more and more uncertainty. As a result, it has
forced us to get closer and closer to our customers, reducing reaction and decision time. This
type of thinking is best supported through the concepts of Design Thinking. As good as an
overview that I have found is contained in the book, Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking
Toolkit for Managers (Columbia Business School Publishing) . The toolset described:
1. Visualization: using imagery to envision possible future conditions
2. Journey Mapping: assessing the existing experience through the customer’s eyes
3. Value Chain Analysis: assessing the current value chain that supports the customer’s journey
4. Mind Mapping: generating insights from exploration activities and using those to create
design criteria
5. Brainstorming: generating new alternatives to the existing business model
6. Concept Development: assembling innovative elements into a coherent alternative solution
that can be explored and evaluated
7. Assumption Testing: isolating and testing the key assumptions that will drive success or
failure of a concept
8. Rapid Prototyping: expressing a new concept in a tangible form for exploration, testing, and
refinement

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9. Customer Co-Creation: enrolling customers to participate in creating the solution that best
meets their needs
10. Learning Launch: creating an affordable experiment that lets customers experience the new
solution over an extended period of time so that you can test key assumptions with market
data.
In BRANOPS, we scale by looking at marketing from a Growth Mindset. We don’t start with a
complex market and try to work back by tweaking and modifying it. Think about Gall’s Law:
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that
worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make
it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
We spend to much time, money, and knowledge trying to be clever or manipulate customers
through these magical sales funnels. The alternative path is to think of them as learning zones.
My practice is to differentiate between clusters and provide value within those groups through
learning launches.
My conversations do not center on personas, linkbait, and manipulation. You don’t change
mindsets in an auto-responder. It is conversations about real people, moments, patterns, and
opportunities. Starting this way allows the qualitative to guide the quantitative that old USA
principle: Understand, Simplify, then Automate.
I approach your efforts by
carrying out five to twelve
experiments (sprints/marketing
campaigns) on three to five
different ideas (or versions of a
similar idea). The number of
experiments should be aligned
with the consequences of failure.
That may sound like a lot of
experimenting but typically
should not take more than a
couple of weeks – less time than
what most teams would spend to
write a marketing plan or a road
map.

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How much tactical execution I need to do is what consumes the time. Give me an idea of what a
weekly budget would look like based on these four questions:
1. How much are you willing to invest?
2. How much time or money can you afford to lose if it doesn’t work out?
3. How much certainty do you need before making a decision?
4. Are the results from other experiments you’ve run so far conclusive or inconclusive?
5. How much of the actual work are you willing to do?
You could even call this a soft launch if you would like. But it can be done quickly and with little
overhead and evolve into something much bigger. The idea is to create a strategic direction
through small incremental iterations. It is less about theorizing and planning and more about
designing and deploying in a type of a sprint.
Below is the reference material for the tools that I use in my work. There are multiple ways to go
about the described process, such as Scrum, Story Branding, Design Sprints, etc. This is not meant
to be prescriptive. Let me know if you have an interest in pursuing.
Reference:
Forbes: ‘Your Story Is Your Strategy’ Says VC Who Backed Facebook And Twitter by Carmine Gallo
Forbes: The Death of Strategy by Bill Fischer
Amazon:
Storyscaping: Stop Creating Ads, Start Creating Worlds by Gaston Legorburu and Dareen McColl
The Art of Relevance by Nina Simmon
The Designing for Growth Fieldbook by Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie
Designing for Growth by Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie
The Physics of Business Growth: Mindsets, System, and Processes by Jeanne Liedtka and Edward
Hess
The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed by Alberto Savoia